CULTURAL HERITAGE AND NEW AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

“Questions of heritage, even where there is commodification of history, makes ‘history’ central to the nature of given cultures and demonstrates that heritage cannot be divorced from the various ‘techniques of remembering’, many of which now involve tourist sites, festivals, events and so on…” (Urry, 2002:159)

Notions of nationhood and heritage are now closely linked – what to choose to preserve and put on display is at least partly determined by national priorities. Stretching back to the 1851 National Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, particular “travel to sites, texts, exhibitions, buildings, landscapes, restaurants and achievements of a society has developed the cultural sense of a national imagined presence” (Urry, 2002:158). Yet it is important to acknowledge the impact and importance of informal, unofficial narratives and stories with the increasing ubiquity of global travel, ‘global diasporas’ (Urry, 2002:159) and global personal connectivities to others. VFR (Visiting Friends and Relatives), health and religious travel accounted for 27% of all inbound travel in 2006 (UNWTO, 2007) or 225 million international arrivals, compared with 154 million in 2001 and 74 million in 1990. Urry (2002:159) cites examples of huge Trinidadian, Chinese and Brazilian diasporas and how diasporic travel “has no clear temporal boundaries” as being ‘home’ and ‘away’ tend to merge into each other. Larsen et al.’s (2006) recent empirical study of working people’s mobility in the Northwest of England shows how 24 informants, ranging from architects (nine) to porters and doormen (six) sustained regular telephone contact (at least one phone call every ten days on average) with people living over 250 km away. Thus nomadism seems integral to today’s age (Makimoto and Manners, 1997) with an increasing number of hybrid connections maintained through “inhabiting machines” such as mobile phones that “reconfigure humans both as physically moving bodies and as bits of mobile information and image, with individuals existing both through, and beyond, their mobile bodies” (Urry, 2004:35). Through these ‘machines’ “connections are crucially transformed, with others being uncannily present and absent, here and there, near and distant, home and away, proximate and distant” (ibid).

A useful way of viewing experiences through LAN is through Urry’s (2002) notion of “the tourist gaze”. Although directed at understanding the consumption of places by people engaged in tourism and not cultural heritage, it does offer insights because it considers how people experience what is put on display in particular places. It also represents the interaction, conflict and tension between the consumer and the provider of the experience and the autonomy of the individual when approaching a place. As such the notion of the tourist gaze has both resonances and dissonances with the experience proffered through LAN. Both are primarily aimed at leisure as opposed to work, arise from movements and stays in new places, involve short-term or temporary experiences, focus on visual experiences, can be anticipated and even constructed and sustained through non-tourist practices (e.g. watching TV). Both are also, to some extent, determined by a series of external factors such as “changing class, gender, generational distinctions of taste within the population of visitors” (Urry, 2002:3). However, the kinds of experiences supported through LAN differ because they are more individual in character and less mass-produced and, thus far, less subject to competition. LAN experiences are also, despite involving the lingering over particular aspects of places typical of the tourist gaze, more ‘in the moment’ and less subject to the pressures of immediate reproduction and capture through visual artifacts and technologies because the network, via real-time data capture, can potentially support exactly this. The mediated experiences need not be ‘out of the ordinary’ but, instead, may simply be ordinary and everyday. The gaze offered by LAN is less constructed through signs than personal memories and past experiences. As such the kinds of less commodified and mass-produced views offered through LAN offer distinct opportunities for ethnographers to uncover current and even past practices ‘from within’.

Our tentative suggestion then is not only that there are other narratives relevant to heritage than ‘the party line’ but also that there are other ways of investigating and preserving culture than those privileging “the visual”. Urry (2002), at the end of his book, admits as much, recognizing “the tourist gaze’s” emphasis on the visual. Recent developments in the role of walking in ethnographic practice (e.g. Pink et al., 2010) and “sensory ethnography” (e.g. Pink, 2009) point to the importance of recognizing and exploiting the observer’s physical engagement with and presence in multiple facets of a place for ethnographic methodologies. The latter aspect of sensory ethnography acknowledges the reflexivity of ethnographic encounters and argues for multiple ways of knowing beyond ‘classic’ observation. Pink (2009:15) describes how recent sensory ethnographies have shifted from focusing on different cultures to considering aspects of everyday life: “Such sensory ethnographies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that informs how people understand their experiences.” (Pink, 2009:15). Pink et al (2010:3), drawing on Ingold’s work (e.g. Ingold, 2007), note the importance of “the recognition that walking is…in itself a form of engagement integral to our perception of an environment” as well as something that can be learned and a means of communication and knowing.

Bruce Chatwin in “Songlines” (1987), points to some of these concerns, describing how Australian aboriginals couple traditional songs and stories with places to the extent that they can be used to navigate the continent. Oral history or “spoken memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews” (Ritchie, 1995:1) is recognized as a ‘heritage genre’ or “cluster of genres” (Portelli, 1998). Ritchie’s (ibid) notion of oral history emphasises the act of transcription, archiving and presentation of the resulting material. Yow (1994:94), on the other hand, stresses the importance of the relationship between the listener and the narrator and how the listener is ‘placed’: “there is someone else involved who inspires the narrator to begin the act of remembering, jogs memory, and records and presents the narrator’s words”. Plummer (2001:28) also emphasizes the role of the listener in gathering “researched and solicited stories” that “do not naturalistically occur in everyday life…they have to be seduced, coaxed and interrogated out of subjects”. Crabtree et al. (2006) have developed ‘life documents’ through ‘the digital record’ or the “natural extension and evolution of the ethnographic record, where technologies of production have progressed over time from paper and fieldnotes to incorporate a veritable host of new computational media to record social life” (ibid:284). In such a view new, ubiquitous and emerging technologies proffer insights into the situated character of social interaction in a way that is mutually supportive of ‘traditional’ ethnographic approaches.

While LAN has the potential to respond to the challenges of sensory ethnography (Pink, 2006; 2009) and generate various kinds of life histories, it also, in more traditionally ethnographic parlence, offers potential for embracing both the senses and “direct and sustained contact with human agents, within their daily lives (and cultures)…” (O’Reilly, 2005:3). Key distinguishing features of the LAN network then are its ability to leverage the individual, personal knowledge and motivations of the non-professional guide. The suggestion here is that ‘the personal’ is being connected to ‘the cultural’ and that there is at least the potential for autobiographical accounts that “self-consciously explore the interplay between the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history and ethnographic explanations” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:742). The portability of mobile technologies deployed also supports the engagement of all the senses. As Urry (2002:146) points out, there is more than sight involved in experiencing a place: “There are not only landscapes…but also associated soundscapes… ‘smellscapes’… ‘tastescapes’… and geographies of touch”. However, these are not LAN’s only potential benefits – the way the network is configured supports both different and developing relationships between people via place-centred narratives.

APPROACH: DESIGN AND METHODS

The LAN design process involved developing the broad LAN concept (see above), field observations of tourists in Singapore, scenario and design concept development, generation of a prototype and, finally, an evaluation of the emerging LAN prototype. The process is best understood as everyday design informed by field observations and evaluations, against even a “quick and dirty” ethnography (Hughes et al, 1994). This poses a few problems for the design process discussed in this paper. For one, at no point in the development of the LAN prototype was ethnography conducted, although the initial observations could be regarded as a “quick and dirty” ethnography. However, that is not to say that there is not much to learn from the process we discuss here for ethnography. For through this process the team, developed refined and tested the LAN concept. Thus we will largely report on the evaluation of the LAN prototype, examining the kinds of data collection approaches that the LAN service supports, the analytical value of this data and how the service developed relates to cultural heritage. The design process and the technical details of LAN are described in Wickrama et al (2010).

The implemented version of LAN discussed in this paper comprised a lightweight netbook with Internet connectivity (e.g. via a USB dongle), a BlueTooth headset, a portable camera carried or worn (e.g. on a helmet) supporting an audio/video service connection to another person, in this case via Skype. Wickrama et al (2010) describe the envisaged end product of LAN as:

“a social networking website, where living avatars offer their services to people who would like to relive and re-experience certain parts of the city, specific periods in their lifetimes or they are simply curious to see something that is remote, exotic or inaccessible for various reasons.”

Thus the future development of LAN is tied to servicing those who has previously been/lived in a place. Here we are concerned with how LAN can service ethnography. The broader implication here is that due to increasing mobilities and personal connectivity a raft of information is available when in a place and appropriately connected, albeit information that, in Crabtree et al’s (2006) terms, is “fragmented”. There are technical difficulties with utilizing this data as well such as issues with the reliability of service and granularity of positioning data. However, despite these concerns LAN develops the experience of mobile guide systems away from traditional issues of managing variable network connectivity, personalization across devices and dynamic delivery of content (e.g. Kenteris et al., 2009) towards the facilitation of ongoing journeys through space, time, roles and interfaces (Benford et al., 2009) and, more specifically ongoing, developing relationships with often physically and temporally distributed others in hybrid environments and changing roles.

FINDINGS

In this section we focus on the data generated from the field trial of the LAN system. The primary focus of this field trial was to inform the (re)design of LAN. It involved two locations – the place being visited by the ‘avatars’, in this case Tanjong Pagar in Singapore (Figure 1, left – depicting one of the team in the ‘avatar’ role) and a meeting room from which the ‘guide’ interacted with the ‘avatar’ (Figure 1, right).

FIGURE 1: The ‘avatar’ on a walk (left) interacting with the physically displaced ‘guide’ via Skype (right)

As we noted above this was not an ethnographic study but there was a genuine motivation for the trial – one of the team’s friends was visiting Singapore for the first time from Vietnam. The trial proceeded by ‘the avatar’, who had not met the particular team member playing ‘the guide’ before the trial, moving around the Tanjong Pagar area, finding her way and experiencing different aspects of the area’s heritage (e.g. a well-known hawker centre). Observers captured interaction ‘at both ends’ via photographs and video – one at the guide ‘end’ and four at the avatar ‘end’. As will become clear below, as the trial played out all the people involved at both ends of trial became involved. Wickrama et al. (2010) describe a detailed content analysis of the 45 video clips, 118 photographs and transcripts generated involving the generation of three descriptive themes and accompanying sub-themes. Here we extract particular video extracts from the trial data for a different reasons – to develop insights concerning the value that this kind of data can offer and lessons for new ethnographies deploying such ‘inhabited technologies’ (Urry, 2004:35). Thus in what we present we do not aim to be complete, but instead extract and discuss the most relevant and exemplary material.

Individual perspectives

The LAN system offered a series of perspectives that were specific to person, place and even particular things. These perspectives often had quite different styles. In the first example depicted in Figure 2 and the extract below, the ‘guide’ (G) is helping the ‘avatar’ (A) find her way using her own knowledge and Google maps. The extract shows the shared uncertainty and need to find information in the environment, but Figure 2 (right) also illustrates the first-person perspective, ‘reality show’, highly indexical view provided via LAN. This extract also shows how interaction over LAN can be characterized as joint discovery, even cooperative work – in this case way-finding. The ‘guide’ and the ‘avatar’ work together when moving through the environment. As this movement unfolds different views of the place visited are provided.

FIGURE 2: The ‘avatar’ walking to the road (left) and at the roadside (right)

G: “Do you see any road name or any signpost?”
A: “The road huh?”
G: “Why don’t you just walk to the nearest road and try to see whether you can find any signpost.
A: “Okay…”

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